The present invention relates generally to the field of data storage hardware and software, and more particularly to dynamically modifying configuration information related to data mirroring within a storage system.
Disaster recovery systems typically address two types of failures, a sudden catastrophic failure at a single point in time or data loss over a period of time. To assist in recovery of data updates, a copy of data may be available from a remote location. Data mirroring is one copy technology for maintaining remote copies of data (e.g., write activity) at a secondary site or secondary storage system. Data mirroring can occur asynchronously to minimize write delays within a storage system of the primary computing system. To isolate and control the mirroring of data to a secondary storage system, each client (e.g., application owner) utilizing a primary computing system and mirroring data to the secondary storage system has one or more logical partitions (LPARs) provisioned within the storage system to support the data mirroring for applications that generate or modify the data of a client.
In this manner, nearly identical copies of changes to written data are maintained in volume pairs between the primary computing system and the secondary storage system. The data stored on the secondary storage system differs from the data within the primary computing system by a time differential equal to or less than a recover point objective (RPO) value that is dictated by the owner of the software application that generates the data. Data may be stored as discrete entities, such as tracks, extents, blocks, etc. Upon receiving mirroring data to a secondary storage system, a copy program, executing within volatile memory of a LPAR within the secondary storage system, regroups records of data based on timestamps into consistency groups that form journal files within the real-storage of the LPAR of the client. Journal files are quickly migrated from the real-storage of the LPAR to intermediate storage volumes. The records of data within the journal files are subsequently distributed from the intermediate storage volumes to corresponding volumes of volume pairs in a secondary storage system.